“Reverse robocall” campaign lets citizens phone-blast SOPA supporters

A website run by two privacy advocates is giving people a chance to deliver …

A Web-based civic action site is providing a way for people irate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) to voice their opinions in a very literal way. Reverse Robocall, a site set up by Shaun Dakin and Aaron Titus, allows users to record a message through the site and perform their own robocalls to politicians and lobbyists.

For a fee of $10, Reverse Robocall will let you record a message that will be delivered as a phone call to the offices of the co-sponsors of SOPA and each of the associations and lobbying groups that have backed the bill in Congress—88 in all. You can even customize the phone number that will appear in caller ID for the call in order to avoid being blocked by systems that reject calls without them. And, if you choose, you can let others listen into your message on the site and rate your effort.

SOPA isn't the only target of Reverse Robocall, and it's not an issue that the site specifically takes a stand on. In an interview with Ars, Dakin said that the site is a non-partisan, for-profit effort aimed at providing a service for advocacy groups, in the same vein as the petition site Change.org. But the service, launched in beta just before Thanksgiving, is also an outgrowth of Dakin and Titus' work as privacy advocates to work against robocalls by politicians, he said.

Dakin, a former executive at a market research firm, is the founder of Privacy Camp, a conference series centered on digital privacy. He's also founder of Citizens for Civil Discourse and the National Political Do Not Contact Registry, which has registered more than 200,000 people who want to opt out of political robocalls.

Reverse Robocall is the pair's way of taking Titus' act of revenge to the next level. The SOPA call is just one of a number of pre-packaged sets of call targets; there are also "products." Some of the first targets were supporters of HR 3035, the Mobile Informational Call Act, also known as the "robocall bill," which would have allowed companies to hit mobile phones with "informational calls." (That bill died in December after massive opposition from privacy and consumer protection groups.) Another option will black a phone message to supporters of the Senate's Protect intellectual Property Act, and yet another allows users to hit all SOPA and PIPA supporters with one recorded message.

robocalling is bloody obnoxious and should be totally and completely illegal for everything other then disaster alerts, so I say good on them, because if they annoy the hell out of politicians enough they'll try and ban it, and then the public will want to know why they can't have it too.

Not that politicians actually want the opinions of the people they represent of course; it's the same the world over, you phone, write a letter, email, whatever, and you get back a "thank you for your concern" with a fact sheet. Nothing else.

robocalling is bloody obnoxious and should be totally and completely illegal for everything other then disaster alerts, so I say good on them, because if they annoy the hell out of politicians enough they'll try and ban it, and then the public will want to know why they can't have it too.

Not that politicians actually want the opinions of the people they represent of course; it's the same the world over, you phone, write a letter, email, whatever, and you get back a "thank you for your concern" with a fact sheet. Nothing else.

So make the bastards suffer.

It does tend to go that way, doesn't it? In Pennsylvania, it's illegal to record a conversation without the consent of all parties. Had nothing to do with protecting people from eavesdroppers or anything. It resulted from a rather nasty fight between the mayor of Philadelphia and some state officials in Harrisburg which culminated in them using their police forces to spy on each other. Harrisburg passed it as soon as they realized the mayor was willing to do it back. His police were also better than their police at it but that's a whole other story.

I might actually do this. It's been bugging me that the response from Senator Casey Jr (D-PA) seems to indicate that he doesn't even know that the "First Amendment" is supposed to be capitalized when used in a sentence. Being a proper name an all. I guess daddy didn't bother to teach his dimwit son about that. (FYI: that particular senator's career exists solely because his father had once been powerful in the Democratic Party. Jr is about is dumb as a doorknob).

Not that politicians actually want the opinions of the people they represent of course; it's the same the world over, you phone, write a letter, email, whatever, and you get back a "thank you for your concern" with a fact sheet. Nothing else.

If I call Megacorp, Inc and complain about a product, they at least send me coupons. Granted the couponds are generally for whatever I complained about ("does $1 off make it better?!"), but there's a response.

With politicians I get a generic response weeks later and then get added to their email/mailing list to be spammed.

But he also gained notoriety in the realm of robocall resistance in January, when he took revenge on a Maryland school board for a 4:30am robocall announcing a school closing. Titus obtained the phone numbers of members of the board, and then robo-dialed them back the next morning at 4:30am with his own recorded message, "thanking" them.

Dude needs a smartphone with a volume scheduler and Google Voice. Then he can control which calls get sent straight to voicemail, and how loud to ring the ones he lets through.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.